Franz Mehring (1846–1919)

Famous German journalist, politician and literary critic; famous German activist of the socialist movement; Marxist theorist, historian, and literary critic; one of the founders of the Communist Party of Germany.

Mehring was born on 1846 in Pomerania, Germany, into a civil servant’s family. From 1866 to 1870, he studied philosophy, history and literature at the universities of Leipzig and Berlin, and after graduation, he engaged in journalism. In his early years, Mehring was a democrat opposed to Prussian dictatorship. Since the 1880s, he began to study scientific socialism and gradually embraced the Marxist theory and became a Marxist. In 1891, he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany and served as a political commentary editor of the Party journal Die Neue Zeit. From 1895, he also served as the editor-in-chief of Leipziger Volkszeitung, making it an important front for the critique of opportunism. In December 1918, he participated in the founding of the Communist Party of Germany and died in January 1919 in Berlin, Germany, after a long illness.

Franz Mehring’s chief works in his life include Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, History of German Social Democracy, von Treitschke, the Killer of Socialists, and the Goals of Liberalism, etc. During his time as the political commentary editor of Die Neue Zeit, he also edited and published the Collected Correspondences of Marx and Engels, and published many popular essays propagating Marxism. His political essays were short, concise and sharply written, attacking the rule of the Wilhelmine Empire and its foreign expansion (including the invasion of China), criticizing the various revisionist views within the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and expounding the fundamental principles of Marxism in simple language. In the Social Democratic Party of Germany, together with Liebknecht, Luxembourg and others, he resolutely fought against revisionism and centrism of Bernstein and Kautsky. After the outbreak of World War I, he actively participated in and led the struggle against imperialist war and social chauvinism of most of the leaders of the Second International, and in December 1918, he founded and established the Communist Party of Germany. After the outbreak of the October Revolution, he actively supported the October Revolution in Russia and refuted the attacks of the bourgeoisie and the Second International’s revisionism on the October Revolution led by Lenin. The limitation of Mehring’s thought were chiefly an overestimation of Lassalle and Bakunin, and a lack of understanding of the essence of the errors of Lassalleanism and Bakunin. Lenin highly praised Mehring and pointed out that Mehring was a person, who not only wanted to be, but who knew how to be a Marxist.